Welcome to this seminar with Uppsala Forum Visiting Fellow Valsamis Mitsilegas, Professor
of European Criminal Law and Global Security at Queen Mary University of London, and
Giovanni Piccirilli, Assistant Professor in Constitutional Law at LUISS Guido Carli University
of Rome.

Mutual Trust, Legal Pluralism and Constitutional Identity in Europe’s Area of Criminal Justice”,
by Valsamis Mitsilegas

The paper will examine the re-articulation of the principle of mutual trust in Europe’s area of criminal justice from the theoretical perspective of legal pluralism. By analysing the interactions between the key actors of mutual trust from both a horizontal (looking at the degree of mutual accommodation between
legal orders and the impact on automaticity in mutual recognition and the scrutiny of national systems in the process of mutual recognition) and a vertical (looking at questions of authority, supremacy and hierarchy that demands of mutual trust may entail) perspective, the paper will evaluate critically the emergence of a renegotiated fundamental rights scrutiny benchmark underpinning mutual recognition.
The analysis will examine judicial responses to limits to mutual trust as well as attempts to create a legal and rights-based level-playing field across the EU by both the EU legislator (and the adoption of secondary EU law on defence rights) and the CJEU (by developing a common understanding in the form of the evolution of autonomous concepts). The analysis will conclude by a critical evaluation of the pluralist challenges underpinning the road from presumed to earned trust in an area which is characterised by considerable legal diversity.

Constitutional identities and "defensive" constitutional pluralism before the Italian Constitutional
Court: the "Taricco saga" and the principle of legality in criminal matters”, by Giovanni Piccirilli

In the last 5 years a chain of judicial decisions by the CJEU and the Italian Constitutional Court focused on the principle of legality in criminal matters, its national understanding and the possibility of interference on it by EU law in the application of art. 325 TFEU.
The principle of legality in criminal matters is considered by the ICC as part of the supreme principles of the legal order and so unamendable via constitutional modifications and untouchable by EU or international law. The CJEU attempted to reconcile the primacy and uniform application of EU law with the necessary pluralism in such a delicate subject. The ICC refused any possible mediation and imposed the necessary priority of national law in this matter. In doing so, the ICC further elaborated on its classical doctrine of "counterlimits" and used for the very first time art. 4(2) TEU in continuity with its traditional dualist approach.